f13.net

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUdM9vrCbow

Dunno, Tarentino's luster wore off awhile ago, but I am a sucker for the 'Ol West setting and Christoph Waltz.

Decaprio as a southern plantation owner? Has my curiosity.

Trailer looked better than the Inglorious Bastards trailer. Still won't see it in the theater.

But does it have your attention?

I saw this yesterday and thought it was great.  Decaprio and Christoph Waltz were both fantastic.  Jamie Fox was good but honestly I could have pictured a few others playing that role that would have done just as good or better.  Lots of violence, swearing, VERY liberal use of the "N" word and of course Samuel L. Jackson calling people motherfuckers.  I highly recommend it if you're a Tarantino fan and enjoy this type of movie but be prepared to get comfortable as its 2h 45 min long.

I liked A.O. Scott's comparison to "Lincoln"--pointing out that the cinema of vengeance has never really ever allowed black vengeance against white wrongdoing, just a bunch of white guys kicking ass on whoever's done them wrong. (There's a few weird exceptions, but I think his point is basically right.) So I think I'll see this--I'm curious.

"The D is silent, hillbilly." :heart:

Not actually a spoiler, just an awesome gif.

I didn't want to fuck up people's browsing experience if they didn't want to see it repeatedly.

Sometimes I'm thoughtful like that.

Wish people would keep that in mind before choosing animated avatars. Oh well, AdBlock to the rescue.

I keep getting this confused with animated film about the thirsty lizard becoming sheriff of Dirt.

Its not the same thing is it?

You are talking about Rango.

The sequel. Rango Unhinged.

The fact that drudge and the rest of the right wing media machine hate this movie is reason enough for me to go see it.

They hate it because people get to say "nigger" in it while they can't and they don't think it's fair. Also, the black guy getting revenge on white people makes them uneasy too. Might give the darkies ideas now that whites are in the minority.

A bit of shoe polish and they will blend right in.

I really liked this. Not quite as much as Inglorious Basterds, but I still thought it was pretty awesome.

edit: ugh me grammar fail

Huh?  Most of the hate is coming from people like Spike Lee, Katt Williams, and a handful of black actors.  I didn't know they were all right wingers. 

Katt Williams....lol.

I really don't know any of Williams stuff, other than he was in one of the Friday movies and he does stand up.  He's just one of the people I saw jumping on the Spike Lee bandwagon. 

Either way, I was just trying to point out that neither political side is condemning Djanog more than the other. 

Didn't he fuck up his career with violent outbursts against his audiences and was last seen doing drug-fueled shoplifting sprees? He was really funny, it's too bad.

I liked this a lot.  I think it will probably take #2 in my Tarantino rankings (after Jackie Brown and above Pulp Fiction/Basterds tie), and there is a lot more going on in this movie than a lot of people (apparently) think.  (Not here, I mean, on the internet/media at large.)

It's easy to miss the plot/character subtleties with some of the silly stuff that happens - I really hem and haw about those things a lot with Tarantino.  'If he would stop doing that he would be a great filmmaker vs. if he stopped doing that he wouldn't be Tarantino' is a debate I have never really decided on.

Particulars:

Drudge/Breitbart and conservative newspapers have been basically attacking the movie, and frequently quoting Spike Lee (who hasn't made a good movie in over a decade and has a personal beef with Tarantino).

My exact sentiment (without the superfluous word).

All my words are superfluous.

I saw this Sat. night.  I consider it also close to as good as Pulp Fiction, and definitely Tarantino's most impactful film.  To give an idea, just about every showing was sold out where I went and this is the 2nd week out.  So the buzz is on with this one.  Great, great film.  One of those must-sees even if you're not interested.

Anyways, I do somewhat agree about the hip-hop distraction in the film but I thought it had artistic significance so I give it a pass.  There's a reason it was there.  Also, Tarantino does what he likes, and he LOVES hip-hop and music in general. (him and RZA from Wu Tang have a bromance)  I daresay he's the "blackest" caucasian producer/director in Hollywood.  Some would laugh at that, but Quentin would likely also laugh and say "go fuck yourself. So what." (he was raised in mostly black and hispanic schools)

So that in essence is why Spike hates him.  He looks at him like the white boy using urban-ish black entertainment as a pawn.  Spike's an ass though.  And this film had more meaningful impact for black america then all of Spike's angsty shit put together, ironically.

I loved Pulp Fiction but haven't really enjoyed anything else by Tarantino as much, Django Unchained has changed that, absolutely brilliant.  I loved the German being the good guy for a change as well.

I think Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction are the best movies Tarantino has directed (+ he did write the story for Natural Born Killers). Django ranks (imho) around third with some others but clearly below the top two.

Spike hates this movie because he can never make a movie about a black man butchering scores of dumb white people and make tarantino dollars. There is plenty of black people that hate the Django because they don't believe tarantino should be allowed to say nigga period cause he is white. And there is plenty of black people that think their retarded, me included.

The movie was fun and a bit long on the tooth. It made no one save our star characters look good, a trend that had few exceptions. Which if anyone should find offensive it should be that, but meh get butt hurt over the n word. Can't say I'm big on the ending but hey it was fun ride.

Dont fall into that trap of "if Quentin was black he wouldn't have made dollars."  That's bullshit.  The problem is African American Hollywood enjoys pandering to pop culture as much as the next douche with money does (singleton, lee, and perry are prime examples).  Quentin could give two shits, which gives him way more freedom to make great films.

Also, fact is there just isnt a decent crop of black directors/producers to begin with in an industry that's already pretty nepotistic against them.  It's lose lose.  So why not just make good films instead of essentially eating on scraps?

Riddle me this... guys like Perry, Lee, and many others in entertainment (diddy and so forth) have enough money to pretty much finance whatever the fuck they want.  But they still feed us shite.  What does this tell you? 

Nah, I dont believe those fools deserve a racial excuse.  They just lack the talent and the ability to separate greed from an artform.  So fuck em I say.  I'll watch the movie color blind.

 :uhrr:

I agree with Lamaros.

But just to humor you, I'll take your example of Diddy. Why does he not make amazing shit? He's got no goddamn taste. I've met Spike a few times and he's kinda still stuck in the last century.

Are there any well-known filmmakers who are black without being "black filmmakers"?

Kinda hard to say as that term is sorta ambiguous, but I'd say:

F. Gary Gray.
Hughes brothers.
Antoine Fuqua


A couple of TV directors whose episodes you've seen a million times but probably have never heard of:

Michael Shultz.
Ivan Dixon (although you probably know him as the cool dude on Hogan's Heroes)

QT's freedom comes from being a film nerd who has made a number of finacially and critically successful films (although the critical success has dampened quite a bit from his early days). If he started to make films that bombed financially he'd find it a lot harder to have that freedom.

Plus he'll probably never want to make a 'message' film, which is what Lee did in the past. But to that end, Lee getting upset about "Django Unchained" will be about as effective as World War II historians being upset about "Inglorious Basterds"(or "U-571", for that matter).

I think he does make message films, he just also tries to make them very entertaining.

Saw it today.

My first impression was that I rather like the more mature Tarantino style.

Why didn't he go all the way though? The call backs to 'quintessential' Tarantino where grating at times and didn't quite fit with the rest of the movie.

I was positively surprised that QT can do heavy without it being silly and then he went being silly again and I thought 'what the fuck was that for'?

What parts are you talking about specifically, just out of curiosity?

To me Django unchained showed that Tarantino has a more serious side. Most of the movie works great even though it is a departure from Tarantino's signature style.

Even some of the sillier elements fit with that. It's a story about Django and how he learns to be free and self reliant.  Calvin Candy talks about that when he makes his speech about the old slave and about how they didn't just kill all of the white people or when he talks about Django as  'one in ten thousand'. But Django doesn't start off as the one in ten thousand he first has to become that person.

It's also the journey of KIng Schultz who became Bounty Hunter for the sheer thrill of it but came to realize that he could no longer make the southern US his personal playground. He realized that he had to take a stand. He and Django talk about it when Django asks him why he helps him to which he answers 'I never gave a man his freedom before and I feel kind of responsible for you'. He sees that the people who give him money for killing the bad guys are basically even worse. He's sort of the 'Anti-Alda', he's also like the basic anti-hero character who redeems himself by doing the 'right thing' for once in his life.

So it even goes with the tone that the movie starts off with a mixture of exploitative brutality and humor and even that it keeps the theme going for a time.

Tarantino even plays with the theme. He tries to make the audience see the world through the eyes of King Schultz as he counters scenes of sheer absurdity with scenes of sheer brutality. It's like if you and your friends went to Disney world and then have to realize that its KKK day at the magic kingdom. It's like 'we came to have fun, why are all of those white angry douches ruining it for us'. You hate it and really wish for the things to happen that King Schultz and Django then do in the end.

The violence in the end has a real cathartic effect after what you experienced beforehand.

We even had some people walk out of the movie because they didn't get what they expected (a fun if violent romp Tarantino is known for) or because they simply didn't want to experience the explicit brutality anymore.

I presume that this was exactly what he was going for because it is a continuation of the theme from Inglorious Basterds. Making the audience realize that what they are entertained by is brutal violence and forcing them to deal with that.

In my mind the movie works very well on many levels but it is diminished in a way by some of the Tarantino-isms he just couldn't let go. So there are elements that really clash with the theme of the movie and I found some stylistic choices or parts of the narrative or presentation to be grating since it pretty much got me out of it at times.

Example: The ridiculously large and slow moving 'MISSISSIPPI' caption between two takes or the whole KKK scene which was ridiculously funny but somehow felt like it belonged in an entirely different movie or the over the top blood and gore splattering when Django kills someone

The film was gut wrenching, visually stunning and dramatic at times and then it completely breaks what it built up by a sort of silly joke at exactly the wrong time like the one person who kind of has to make fun of difficult situations because he can't deal with thing getting real.

In my mind the movie could have been really great if Tarantino would have gone all the way and if he could have let go of his silliness and really embraced where this film was going. It felt to me as if Tarantino was surprised by where he went with that film himself and inserted his Tarantino-ism for that.

I'm probably overanalyzing the fuck out of that movie but I really felt that there was a whole other great film in there Tarantiono was too afraid to do.

Also my django unchained pet peeve:

There are probably a dozen different tellings and retellings of the Nibelung saga about Siegfried both from Norse and German mythology and they differ in key elements like names, places or even key plot elements. It is sort of a mythical retelling of key historical events of central and northern european history. It goes from the defeat of the roman general Varus by the German Arminius through the migration period after the sacking of rome when the Germanic tribes took control of most of what was left from the western roman empire and the first Germanic kingdoms arose and the struggle with the slavic tribes (like the huns led by Attila) that pushed them westwards. It sort of tells how things came to be as they were in 11th century Europe while foregoing historical accuracy (or facts).

Most of the names were altered or changed to fit the local languages and customs, the story was connected to the Norse or Germanic pantheon (basically the same with different names) and it was put into an entirely mythical context where most of the important historical figures where in a way either related to the gods or to other mythical or supernatural beings. For example Brunhilde in the Nibelung is a Valkyrie that got punished by Odin for being disobedient and imprisoned behind the wall of fire King Schultz talks about in the movie. 'Brunhilde' is the literal translation of 'ildikó' which is supposedly the name of one of Attila's wives and 'Etzel' the King that wants to marry 'Krimhilde' after her husband Siegfried was murdered is literally (as in Germanic reproduction of the name) Attila the Hun.

The most famous German tale of the Nibelung would be the "Nibelungenlied" which is a series of poems from 11th century Germany and King Schultz is correct in that every German with a classical education would probably know about the story and the historical context (as the last few paragraphs of me nerding out about it clearly show) however the story he tells Django is from none of those historical texts.

The story he tells Django is from Richard Wagner's cycle of epic operas 'The Rhine Gold', 'The Valkyrie', 'Siegfried' and 'Twilight of the Gods' that comprise the 'Ring des Nibelungen'. Wagner spent most of his life researching as much about Norse and Germanic history and mythology as possible and the story he told in the 'Ring' is his own interpretation and also an amalgamation of different stories and texts that also includes parts of the Grail saga and elements from other important mythological texts.

 The premiere of the 'Ring' cycle was in August of 1876 in Bayreuth, Germany so King Schultz would have never heard about that particular version of the story since he'd been roaming the south for years before he met Django in 1878. Even if he did hear about it he also told it wrong. Siegfried never married Brunhilde. He rescued her but not from a Dragon but from a prison built by father of the gods Odin himself.

Brunhilde is actually the one that orchestrates Siegfried's murder because Siegfried disgraced her and let that disgrace become public.

The movie takes place in 1858.

I think you might be over-thinking what is basically a spaghetti western. Nutty anachronistic stuff is part of their charm.

Tarantino was not afraid of anything. The dude simply does not give a fuck. He makes genre films. And that is exactly why the MISSISSIPPI style thing is there. However, there is plenty to analyze in a Tarantino movie seeing as he is a god damn walking Wikipedia of film. But he's not Spielberg and he's not Joel or Ethan Coen. He's Tarantino and his love for genre films is what separates him and also what allows him to pull off the MISSISSIPPI style of things.

That being said, specifically that kind of stuff is most notable in his last two movies. All of his films have quirks in them, but that sort of thing was important for the time of film he was paying homage to.

The movie you are looking for would be fun, but would not be a Tarantino flick.

I agree that is a genre piece but I still think he was keenly aware that this would offend the "sanitize history" crowd and was happy to poke them in the eye. It is incredibly topical in a country were a large segment is experiencing existential dread that we elected and re-elected a black president and is trying erase slavery from the textbooks.

Of course he was. He's said as much. I don't think the two are mutually exclusive.

Tarantinos' best work since Pulp Fiction, amazing soundtrack too. I couldn't believe it was over 2½ hours long, it just whizzed by.

I liked it just for how much it was pissing off the closet racists in my blogroll, especially the ones that try to pretend their confederacy boosterism has nothing to do with racism.  It grabs ante-bellum romantics by the back of the neck and rubs their nose in just how nasty the  'peculiar institution' was.

It managed to be a really good movie on top of it, the first time in a long time I saw a movie in the theater and felt it was worth the ticket price.

--Dave

Bought it on blu ray today. Loved it. I'm torn on the tone shifting from funny to serious and back. For a moment, the hooded numbskulls, it was Blazing Saddles.  :grin:
But I laughed pretty hard, so it worked.

I... was expecing much more of the N-word. After Pulp Fiction's "Dead nigger storage" scene, Django was kinda mellow.

I believe "Is that a n**** on a horse?" was also a blazing saddles reference.

My hatred for Tarantino aside, and the inconsistent quality of the "flashbacks" for Django, this movie was absolutely superb. I'm basically convinced the Waltz can make basically anything better.

To me, as a fan of Tarantino before I see this as him really starting to refine his style into something beyond fan wankery love letters other movies(though I still like his older stuff)  

Waltz plays no small part in what makes this movie great but looking back I think this and to a lesser degree Inglorious Basterds, will be marked as a turning point in Tarantino's career.

Inglorious Basterds was by far the most entertaining movie he'd made. Letting Waltz take the lead for 2 hours and 10 minutes in Django was precisely what he needed to do though. That guy is a wizard.

I thought it was utter wankery of the lowest kind, worse than Kill Bill. I agree that Walz was certainly the best thing in it, though.

Geez, I liked Inglorious and I really hate Tarantino's earlier stuff. I need to see this, I think.

You need to watch it at least once, if only to see why Waltz earned every milligram of that Oscar.

Curse Netflix for not having this available.

Think it's like $4 to stream it from your service of choice.

schildflix has it.